


Mock Interview

by evelyn_b



Category: Workingman's Blues #2 (Song)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:27:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evelyn_b/pseuds/evelyn_b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Honesty is impossible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mock Interview

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soundingsea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundingsea/gifts).



> Ok, I am having endless problems with this formatting, but am currently in transit and can't do much else. I am arriving in the evening of the 22nd and will try to make it more readable as soon as I can. I apologize ahead of time for any readability problems. :(

_  
_  
I'm trying to feed my soul with thought   
Gonna sleep off the rest of the day   
Sometimes no one wants what we got   
Sometimes you can't give it away    
_   
_

  
  
Last night I rode my bike down to the Eagle Travelstar Travel Center in the winter wind. _Tell us about a time when you had to make a difficult decision._ I stood at the edge of the parking lot with my jacket open, and walked out between the sleeping trucks with my best impression of a slow hooker sway, just to see what it would be like. 

_Just kidding, not really._ I was there for a job interview. Eagle Travelstar #415 had a full-page ad in the paper last week, hiring all positions. Of course they were going to ask all the standard bullshit questions, the whole  _why are you the best person for this job_ , the _where do you see yourself in ten years._ In ten years Jude and I will be legally married and I'll be signing everything Mrs. Jude Malone just to spite the world, and we'll be sitting in our Buddhist-cushion-furnished living room telling our kids about what a disaster this interview was, ha ha. But you know what? it didn't matter. I came out here thinking it was my last hope and I had to give it my all and then I bombed it completely, got myself blacklisted from every retail establishment in Lewis County and surrounding counties, but just look at yourself, I'll tell my son or daughter, look at your arms and legs, look at how much we love you. You are here and that is all the proof you need that everything turned out for the best.

Of course I answered the questions correctly; I didn't say those things I always pretend I'm going to say when they pull out a question like _Tell me about yourself._ I didn't take it literally and start listing off my favorite books, or launching into some long inspirational story about my great-granddad Hiram Mason running the Lewis County Klan off his new-bought land seventy-two years before the latter-day Masons lost the last of it to National City Bank, and getting burnt blind for his troubles, or by what circuitous logic I wasted my merit scholarship on half a history degree instead of a whole business one. I didn't even hint at the high hopes I've let drop on the ice and the pavement or how losing the farm made my dad crumple up and fold on himself, so that even our oldest jokes seem far-off now and in someone else's voice. I didn't say, "I first knew I loved Jude when he made a _Dune_  tribute video for my birthday a year before we even considered dating." I don't say "We live behind the railroad tracks, and every night the whistle tears a hole through my sleep." I don't say my eyes are brown, my favorite show is _Firefly,_ my credit was perfect before Jude's asshole dad dragged him to that church meeting and gave him his first panic attack in three years while I was ringing up three hundred cans of cat food at Wal-Mart. That was six months ago. Now my dad says I might not ever be able to buy a house. If I'd never moved in with Jude, I'd probably still be in college. If I'd never been born, I wouldn't need your eight dollars an hour. There are things you regret, and things it doesn't make sense even to imagine regretting.

I know that's not what you're asking.  


Instead, I usually try to say something about being a super-friendly person who loves solving problems and meeting new people in a customer-service context. Which is a lie and obviously a lie; I am an introvert from the bone out. _Where are you happiest?_ On the couch with my Judelet, playing BioShock, on the couch reading _Ex Machina_ or one of Jude's design books. In the long arms of Jude Malone, in shadow or light, his dry skin and his soft stale-bread scent an anchor and a home.   
  
 _Just kidding, not really._  
I mean, obviously I'm happiest behind the register of Lewis County's largest and cleanest travel center, ringing up beef jerky and Red Bull and coffee-machine coffee for the fascinating and cosmopolitan travelers of US-12. I am trembling in anticipation and joy just looking at your killer new register setup with its filthy touch-screens illuminating the greasy fingerprints of all who came before, just standing under the gorgeous jingle- jangle of your top-volume Christmas music. I would love nothing more than to give my life to Travelstar Inc., my arms to its mop and bucket, my small strength to its humming closets of cold beer and jewel-colored pop. I mean I long for the ache in my feet that comes on halfway through a seven-hour shift and climbs my spine like a column of smoke. I mean I am not really this bad at interviews, I promise.  
  


We'd been planning to renew his prescriptions after I got my six-month health insurance at my old job, maybe get him eased off the meds that made him hazy and prone to rippling like a pond at a touch, maybe even find an advocate for him, for the future, someone to help set up the hormone therapy and the counseling and the surgery eventually, if that's what he wants. He's been quiet about what he might want, what he calls a habit of not knowing, but that was part of the point; we had a wish list written up and everything, a whole calendar of what doctor when. Of course, it didn't happen like that. He got rushed to the emergency room instead and by the time anyone called me I was halfway through my shift at Wal-Mart and Front-End Manager Shannon Sieznewski told me I couldn't leave until I'd filled out the Emergency Absence forms in triplicate and given an oral account of my reasons for leaving to the store manager. I didn't do it. I just got my stuff and left. The next day I went in to work and they sent me home. Well, what were you expecting, what did you think would happen? Jude says I grew up like a rich girl, thinking like rich people do: that you can major in a thing like history just because someone told you it was important to know the roots of things, that your employers couldn't possibly fire you for a thing like leaving the store for an emergency. Two days later, I got a bill for my uniform and badge. The end. Then the medical bills came, in dead-leaf clusters of two and three. Then we had our first fight, subject: What Were You Thinking, Bree, and our second, over whether or not we had to sell the game consoles. I won, but it wasn't really a victory. The silence in the apartment now is a sore and swollen hum. The money we made from them barely made a dent. I didn't know before they were gone how much the games were art to Jude, how much they were a part of himself outside himself for safekeeping. Now when I'm gone he curls up on the floor, at the foot of the couch or under the wobbly half-stove, with music in his ears and his mother's afghan wrapped around him. Now I promise we'll buy them back, and he pretends to believe me, and maybe soon he can believe me for real. 

There's a story of how we met. There's a progression of hours and days, a slow cumulation of jokes, the first kiss under hideous Christmas lights, a whole Blaze Romance Library of insufficient and necessary facts. But that isn't what you're asking. That isn't what I'm about to say.

  
  
Tonight I stood outside the Eagle Travelstar for half an hour, walked for half an hour. Not practicing, exactly. More like a reconnaissance mission. Top-secret from myself no less than from the management of the Travelstar, impossible anyway. No, not impossible - Anything Is Possible If You Believe. There was nothing extraordinary about the action involved, nothing outside the range of possibility. I tried to imagine I was fifteen again, single and ignorant and curious to the point of panic. It wasn't anything, when you thought about it, all, but muscles contracting and slackening, tissue and fluid, atoms whirling in near-infinite space. Not a betrayal, not a fall. A throwback, a few stray moments misplaced from a feeble teenage rebellion. The bells would jangle over the Eagle Travelstar doors and my voice would fall like a stone to the blacktop. "Hi, would you like some company?"   
  


  
  
 _Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding._  
  


Of course, I'm lucky to be able to think such a thing through in the first place. That I can picture it at all instead of getting all wordlessly propelled into the dark of the truck lot by raw desperation is a clear sign of how well I must be doing compared to 99% of the world. I'm lucky to have found a job in the first place, lucky to have gone to college at all, lucky to have had a credit rating to ruin, to be healthy and clear-headed and lucky lucky lucky. Failure to acknowledge that you are one of the lucky ones is a criminal offense in eleven states and grounds for immediate dismissal in twenty-nine more. _Well, just thank the Lord you're still breathing,_ as my family would say. or, per Jude's stepmom, _I just thank the Lord we still live in a free country._ The heroic example of Hiram Mason, stumping around the perimeter of his land all eyeless and face-melted and flanked by snarling dogs, ought to present an instructive contrast to your own situation: if you aren't literally being set on fire by Klansmen _as we speak,_ you had better get down on your knees and _praise the shit out of the Lord_ this instant, young lady. 

I get it, though. I get that I'm lucky.

In ten years our kids will think this whole year is the best story ever. Can you believe I was afraid to tell your daddy I'd lost my job? I'll say. I was so mad at myself for losing that job. I was so afraid we were going to lose everything.  
  
 _But you didn't lose everything,_ they'll remind us, all proud that they already know the story. They have figured out the ending, but we still have to tell it.  


 _No, we survived. We did ok._

 

After I lost my job, Jude and I dumped out his remaining meds on the kitchen table, bright blue and yellowy-white, and sawed each circular tablet in half with the steak knife. He wanted to do quarters, but it pulverized the tablet, left a coarse powder on the tabletop he stamped his finger into and tongue-tipped, shivering at the taste like he'd bit a lemon.  
  
"This is dangerous," I said.  _Consult a physician before changing dosage,_ the label says, but with what money? What physician? The psychaitrist who prescribed these still thinks of Jude as a girl: Malone, Jennifer A.. Is still, for all we know, in favor of Jude's return to the address printed on the label- 1151 RR 114, the little low-lit brick and vinyl house where too much has already happened. He turns his downy head under my arm like a cat's. "Less dangerous than running out."  
  


  
"Maybe we can go to that Medicaid clinic."

Jude hunched his shoulders and hooked his chin between his bent knees. "I don't know. I don't know how they are."

"I don't like you being by yourself. What if something happened?"

"I could come with you to work. I could be your in-person letter of recommendation." He wrapped his long arms around my neck and sing-songed into my shoulder. "Bree Mason is a genius of the cash register _and_ in the bedroom. Also an actual genius. Please give her twenty MacArthur grants immediately so she can stay home and bake me pies."

  
"I'm not sure that would work."

He laughed. His laugh has always been boyish, out of step with his reedy uncertain voice. "Are you serious, it would totally work."

"I mean I don't think you'd be allowed to just hang out with me all day."

"Boo. Hiss."

  


  
I went out yesterday and stood by the side of the Travel Center, forcing eye contact with the truckers, just to see what it would be like. You know those giant piles of filthy black snow at the edge, like those hills of crusty black snow all pitted and frozen and re-frozen? I walked out there and I walked back, weaving between the shuddering and sleeping trucks, to see if I could propel myself, you know, trying to project-- what? Openness? Availability. Seductive sprite-Bree, sprung boobs-first out of my chest into a slouching trucker's face in a burst of cartoon stars under the scribbled-on signs saying NO SOLICITING. And then what?

An accident or two of contact and response, immediately misfiled as a memory in the jumble of reckless weekend rides in Maya's car, years before there was any Jude or any future to grab onto, filed in the garbage heap of high school with the burning ache of road, music, hot skin, the skinny long-fingered boys' touching clumsy swagger and Maya's sarcastic shrieks from the front seat, "Oh my  _God,_ Bree!" I can do that if I have to, if you send me away and Target sends me away and Lakeland Staffing Solutions takes my drug-test urine and the twenty pages of my required personality test and gives me nothing back. I could be fifteen in my mind, arrogant and ignorant, invincibly giggling. Commit a meaningless act or two and leave it in the past where it belongs, with the others like it. Keep the money for the future.

  
  


No. Do not plan. Do not acknowledge.

Stand in the damp December wind with hands in pockets, shift forward, lift heels, fall back. There is nothing wrong or strange or bad about standing in a place. In ten years, I'll be laughing at myself for even thinking like this. Naive Bree, always exaggerating some thing or another. In ten years, none of this will matter. Every one of these long heavy hopeful seconds will be absorbed into a hilarious story called Scenes from That One Winter When Everything Went Wrong.

Everything will be funny by then. The kids will laugh to the point of total collapse at how overdressed you always were for interviews and Front-End Manager Shannon Sieznewski yelling after you all impotent and terrible in her thick-soled shoes and bleached-out hair. She was really afraid, you'll realize all of a sudden one afternoon-- afraid some dumb snide college kid would cost her her job by walking out like that, afraid of how vulnerable she was, a new manager, how obvious and raw her failure would look to Corporate Headquarters. Her three kids all had some kind of allergy; her husband had lost his leg somehow. In high school, everyone said she would be an artist; she told the class she wanted to work for Walt Disney Studios. You would have done the same, maybe, probably, if it came to it. But there's no need to spoil the mood of the future like that; this is a funny story. A stupid woman chased you out to the parking lot of Wal-Mart when your husband was sick, but you forgave her. You will have forgiven everyone everything, and even your face will have changed, gone still and serene with the wisdom of the acknowledged lucky. "I swear, I thought she was going to kill me dead over those forms," you will say, and Jude will laugh so hard he will get the hiccups and your kids will shove one another and shriek with joy as they jump higher and higher from the couch springs, and everyone will feel safe and far inland from the whistling edge where you are standing now.

 _What motivates you to do a job well?_ I've answered that question a thousand times, and all of the answers were lies. How can I tell you what you already know? How can I make a whole life look like a promising job candidate for Eagle Travelstar daytime cashier? When I told Jude I wasn't getting our six month insurance plan, his narrow face went red and white, and he said, "Ok, that's ok." He said, "I was sick of that bullshit anyway. All it does is make me tired." He put his hands to his temples, closed his eyes, and smiled into the dark, a wide pinkish grin, more girlish than anything about him, his voice fake-deep, fake distant. "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion." There are no words for how I loved him and was afraid, and no way to say it under these lights, in these plastic chairs and indifferent Christmas din, that would be worthy of it. We sat on the kitchen floor, on the hard floor where he slept then in anticipation of the night sweats he used to get before the medication, and I held his head in my lap, stroked the bright stubble at the back of his neck. There are no questions you could ask to which this love is not the answer. That's why I'm the best person for this job. I am the best person for this job because I have to be.

That doesn't make me special. 

Anyone in Lewis County could say the same thing and speak the truth. I know it and you know it. We're all willing to take what we can get. You could throw a rock anywhere in a hundred mile radius and hit a dozen people like me, with a dozen good reasons to be this way. A dozen loves for a dozen eternities, buried behind the shades of half a dozen cracked-floor apartments behind the railroad tracks, half a dozen cars with blankets stuffed up against the back windows. Throw a rock in the other direction and you'll get the same. Tap the shoulder of anyone in the Wal-Mart grocery or waiting to get called back in the cramped lobby of Lakeland Staffing Solutions and you'll find the same. Every one of us is the best person for this job. I'd be lying if I tried to tell you otherwise.

I can do it. Don't get me wrong. I can lay down my life at the foot of Eagle TravelStar, work five hours a week or seventy, work without overtime, sell the fridge and live on beef Top Ramen and sandwich case discards and my one pop per day. What I can't do anymore, I guess, is lie to you about why. That proves I didn't want this job badly enough to deserve it. That proves it was all my fault. 

_Just kidding, just kidding._ Of course I'm going to lie.

There are twenty-nine half-doses left, twenty-nine days at half-strength. Last night he couldn't sleep. When I came home bringing the icy wind with me he was sitting propped up against the little two-burner stove in the kitchen, resting his head in the crack between stove and whining fridge with the red-and-yellow afghan around him. I sat down by him and lay his head in my lap, and covered his eyes with my hands against the light. A half-dose every other day means fifty-eight days, every third day, eighty-seven. Anything could happen in eighty-seven days. Everything could fall into place: a new job, a friend with a car, a chance to change direction. You can hear the train whistle long before the train comes, and while the cars still clatter by your window you can hear it in the far distance, crying over the long flat warehouse stores, over the highway and the frozen trampled fields. These times are already a memory. They will shatter our bones and pass. 


End file.
